June 07, 2015

Anohito

English needs a word like あの人 anohito (pronounced "a-noh-shtoh"). It means "that person" and it's a completely neutral way to refer to someone. Anything can be offensive, of course, depending on how it's used, but as far as I can tell in normal usage anohito is not considered offensive.

The advantage of the word is that it doesn't imply anything at all about the one being referenced. It doesn't even imply a sex; you can use it for men or for women. It doesn't imply any kind of age; you can use it for kids or for adults. It works for people you know, people you don't know, people you like, people you don't like, and anyone else.

Reason I need that word is to refer to the person whose surname is "Jenner" who is in the news right now. I don't feel comfortable right now using either "he" or "she" for anohito, and picking either "Bruce" or "Caitlyn" forces me to decide on one or the other.

If I refer to Jenner as "him" the PC Police will arrest me. If I refer to Jenner as "her" it makes me feel like barfing. Powerline says Jenner hasn't gone under the knife yet. Photos indicate that Jenner has been undergoing hormone treatment, though, and has grown breasts. If Powerline is right, it means that at the moment Jenner is a hermaphrodite and we English speakers don't actually have an appropriate pronoun for hermaphrodites.

If I used the English phrase "that person" it wouldn't be neutral. In English that's a little rude, and it also makes clear my discomfort with other ways of referring to that person.

April 22, 2015

Translation notes

When I was plundering Dog Days S3 last night, I was going through the [FBI] sub that I just downloaded. Previously I had been watching HorribleSubs (i.e. stolen from Funimation or Crunchyroll) with which I have not been totally satisfied. Anyway, I started jotting down notes, and here they are:

In episode 5, HorribleSubs translated moribito as "Forest People", which is a literal translation. FBI translated that as "dryads", which I like better even though it's less precise.

In episode 6, HorribleSubs translated omiai as "arranged marriage meeting". FBI had it as "engagement meeting" which is a lot better.

FBI translated shin ryu as "Divinegon", which is weird, instead of as "true dragon". (But they weren't consistent about it.)

Ep 6, during his period of anonymity, Horriblesubs translated all references to Lief as "they". That's a little too politically correct to me since it was blatantly obvious that the challenger was male. FBI uses "he" and "him".

Ep 7, The Genoise call Godwin o-chan which is difficult to translate. The chan honorific is very familiar and can be taken as insulting depending on circumstances. One place you'll run into it is tou-chan referring to one's father, which is best translated as "Daddy". In this case, with the Genoise using it for Godwin, it is a bit too familiar and is just a touch mocking. The reason they can get away with it is that they're not under his command, and none of them give anything away to him in combat ability or magic, and he knows it. As Gaul's personal guard, the Genoise arguably rank him in terms of status, so they're talking "down", as it were. HorribleSubs made it "old man"; which at least conveys the familiarity and a degree of rudeness. FBI dodged the whole issue and just used "Godwin" instead.

Ep 7, when Godwin announces the duel, he uses Kisamara to refer to his soldiers. FBI makes that "Soldiers". Horriblesubs didn't translate it. So? Kisamara is the plural of kisama which is one of the word that means "you". It's also extremely rude and hostile; often it's fighting words. It's also thug-speak; it's something you'd hear more often from someone using ore than from boku. Most of the characters in DBZ use it to each other, for instance. It's just about the strongest in the language and it's worse than temee.

Ep 7, when Nanami gets MCSA'ed, and Noir announces it. Horriblesubs says, "Nice fanservice from Prince Leaf to the Galette Knights." FBI says, "Prince Lief, the Galettian Knights are grateful for your performance!" She actually used the word "sabisu", which has always meant "fan service" in this show, so FBI is dodging another one.

Jaune's accent drives me nuts. I think it's Kansai-ben. It's the same dialect as Hayate speaks in Nanoha Strikers. (Which doesn't make any sense since she grew up in the same city as Nanoha and Nanoha speaks with a vanilla Tokyo accent.) As to Jaune, TVTropes says, "Osaka-ben is generally used to indicate a fun loving, impatient, loud, boisterous personality" -- which perfectly describes Jaune.

Ep 9, sorabito. Horriblesub took that one literally, too, thus "sky people". FBI used "sylphs", which is classier.

In case you're interested, the disease is 病魔 byouma.

Horriblesubs calls the miniature Farine's "avatars". FBI calls them "sprites", which again I think is better.

1
"o-chan" is like... "pops". Very familiar if you're using it to talk to your actual dad, not quite disrespectful but absolutely informal. Used to an older man, you're either indicating a close relationship (and being a bit cheeky) or talking to a stranger and being REALLY cheeky. "Old man" works fine here too.

"kisama", hm. It is not -just- used in the fighting-words sense. In fact it is also a formal and completely correct form of address within the military (Japanese military dialect has quite a few things like that). So it's actually completely normal for a general to use that term for his troops, right? (That used to throw me for a loop, though. "Huh? Did I just hear that?")

Gender ambiguity within the context of pronouns is hellishly hard to translate properly. The real key question is, do you really need it? Basically "is it important that the speaking characters not know the gender of this person?" If it is, you've got no choice - either you go with stilted speech or you spoil the surprise. If it's not, screw it, use the proper pronoun and go on with life.

(This is even more difficult if the character in question is using inappropriate pronouns of their own. Reni from Sakura Wars, for example, looks like a boy, uses "boku", and is completely androgynous right up until a bath scene exposes her secret...)

I don't like "engagement meeting", honestly. The key is that the process is often not voluntary for both parties (at least, it's something one or the other is doing in response to family pressure and not on their own accord; it's something fundamentally different from a date.) "Arranged marriage interview" might work better. I'll agree that it's a mouthful though.

"Apostle" is literally correct (interestingly, same term they used for the Angels in Eva.)

3
Is the military usage a holdover of the historical one? "Kisama" used to be very polite, IIRC. Both the "ki" and "sama" kanji that make it up are positive terms... the "sama" is the same one as all the awestruck "onee-sama"s and "kami-sama"s we hear in anime.

I always imagined it taking a negative turn in the same way Han Solo called Leia "your Highness" and "your Worship"...

March 20, 2015

Strike the Blood -- "kenjuu"

There's a word kenjuu they use all the time in this series which gets translated as "familiar". Normal vampires have the ability to summon one of these. Kojou will eventually have 12 of them, but at the beginning they exist but don't acknowledge his mastery. It's a plot point in the series that he is gradually gaining control over more and more of them as time goes on. (Actually it's a deus ex machina; every time he gets in a bind he gets a new one and it has exactly the power he needs to get out of it.)

Anyway, FFF translates it as "familiar", which usually means tsukaima.

Kenjuu isn't in the dictionary, so I assume it's two words. I've got it that 獣 juu is "beast", because most of the kenjuu have the form of animals. Kojou's first one is "Regulus Aurum" and it looks like a tiger, for instance. Vatler's all look like snakes, gaining him the nickname hebi tsukai "snake user".

Is it this 権 ken, meaning "authority" or "right (to do something)"? Nothing else looks reasonable.

1
I cheated and looked at the Japanese Wikipedia page for the series. It's 眷獣; the only word I find that starts with that ken is 眷族 kenzoku = "family; dependents. retainer", and you found the right juu, beast.

That's not cheating, and part of why I was frustrated is that I couldn't find the original Japanese spelling anywhere.

I did some searching in English and found a place where someone was talking about translating the first light novel, and had decided on "blood beast" for a translation. (Deliberately not being literal.)

3
"blood beast" is an odd choice, basically abandoning the meaning of the original word. The only word containing 眷 in JMdict that isn't based on kenzoku is 眷顧 kenko = "patronage", so this translator is shaping the reader's perception in a way that differs significantly from the original.

January 17, 2015

Pronunciations

I've heard two examples recently of how the Japanese think English speakers pronounce Japanese names.

In theory every mora in Japanese except ん is what we English speakers would call a consonant followed by a vowel. However, there are three major exceptions to that: す su, つ tsu, and し shi often drop the vowel sound and get pronounced respectively as s, ts, and sh.

Anyway, in the first episode of season 3 of Dog Days, there's a segment of Nanami and Shinku competing in the Iron Athletics competition in London, and the announcer (I think he's supposed to be English but he sounds Australian to me) pronounces Nanami's surname "takatsuki" as tah-kah-tsoo-kee. The Japanese pronounce it as tah-kats-kee.

The other is in the last episode of Arpeggio of Blue Steel. The US Navy in San Diego transmits a message to Japan informing them that the sub arrived safely. It's addressed to Yokosuka. The Japanese pronounce that yo-ko-ska but the American (and it was an American this time) says yo-ko-soo-ka.

Neither case was played for laughs; there was no feeling of "laughing at the gaijin". But I have a feeling that this kind of error is kind of a brand for English speakers, just like mixing up "L" and "R" is a brand for Japanese trying to speak English.

1It's addressed to Yokosuka. The Japanese pronounce that yo-ko-ska but the American (and it was an American this time) says yo-ko-soo-ka.

It's well-known 'round these here parts that I'm kinda a Pacific War guy. Yokosuka Naval Arsenal was the big base for the IJN in WWII, in much the way you might say San Diego was for the US Navy (Truk and Pearl Harbor might be thought of as mirrors of each other, though that's not strictly true).

You'd think, then, that I'd know how to pronounce "Yokosuka." It's only been in the past few years that I knew "Yo-ko-ska" was correct.

2
Interestingly enough, I know a few former servicemen that spent time in Japan, and they all say it "yokoska" like the Japanese. Hadn't really thought about it like that, but it does happen in a lot of place names.
Not that they Japanese ever haven't functionally dropped the two "u" in Toukyou.

Posted by: sqa at January 17, 2015 11:10 PM (k2E7c)

3
I myself only learned the correct pronunciation of Yokosuka by listening closely to the voices in Arpeggio of Blue Steel.

One that confused the heck out of me is watakushi. (That's one form of "I" and it implies that the speaker is nobility. Gruier and Grunhilde in Mouretsu Pirates use it.) It's pronounced wa-tahk-shee. BUT...

If you pluralize it with the -tachi ending, thus watakushi-tachi, it's pronounced wa-ta-koosh-ta-chee.

Probably that's because saying wa-tahk-shee-tah-chee is uncomfortable and confusing, but that's just a guess.

10
I had read somewhere that an "oo" (as in ookami, "wolf"), and an "ou" (Toukyou) used to be pronounced differently, but the pronunciations drifted together over time. Now they're both pronounced "oo", and the "ou" phoneme has vanished. And most of the "oo" spellings went away with it; I can't think of one that doesn't appear at the start of a word (ookami, ooki).

Posted by: Mikeski at January 18, 2015 07:06 PM (lO+tS)

11
Now that it has been mentioned...I have to wonder how Akatsuki is pronounced. I always pronounced the name of the destroyer and class as 'A-kat-su-ki' but maybe it should be 'A-kat-ski'...Which is actually is how they pronounce the name of a character in Log Horizon with the same Romanized spelling.

Posted by: cxt217 at January 18, 2015 07:30 PM (+Bfy8)

12
"Another weird exception, while we're on it, is how ひ hi is often pronounced "sh". "

I have never heard this. The only thing I hear is that sometimes the i sound is very short.

14
"In theory every mora in Japanese except ん is what we English speakers would call a consonant followed by a vowel. However, there are three major exceptions to that: すsu,つtsu,and しshioften drop the vowel sound and get pronounced respectively ass,ts, andsh."
This is called devoicing. It's most common, even in Western speakers, in the copula desu and the polite verb ending -masu.

Posted by: muon at January 19, 2015 01:23 AM (XIprt)

15
There seems to be a consistent set of rules for what sounds can be devoiced, allowing Japanese people to talk faster without ambiguity.

1) Any character that begins with a consonant and ends with "-u" can be devoiced...
2)...As long as it really is a single character, not a compound character like "shu" (しゅ) or "chu" (ちゅ).
3) Because of Rule 2, the characters "shi" and "chi" can also be devoiced. (Maybe "ji" as well, though I can't recall hearing that.)
4) Long vowels are never devoiced, e.g. "fu" could be devoiced, but never "fuu".

As to when devoicing is used, it depends on a lot of factors: how fast you are talking, whether you would end up with too many consonants in a row, whether you would end up with a word with no vowels, and how polite you want to sound. (If you are really trying to sound polite, pronounce both syllables in "desu.")

October 01, 2014

Loner?

In Hyperdimension Neptune, there's a word they keep using to describe Noire that sounds to me like bochi. The subs translate it as "loner" and from context the implication is "someone who has no friends".

5
Don't think it's a suffix. Written 独り法師 (variants 一人ぼっち and 独りぼっち), which supports the etymology that it comes from some phrase about being lonely as a monk (compare poor as a churchmouse).
Also seems to show up in -pocci variant; looks like another variant pronunciation.
No good idea yet about whether there's a regular process from houshi to hotti, though the ho/bo/po is regular enough.

Posted by: HC at October 02, 2014 08:57 PM (SUdnE)

6
I meant to look at that OVA but cannot find it for easy streaming anywhere and I'm not up to torrenting it on a Starbucks wireless (coincidentially right next to the Ebola hospital where I'm stuck for 2 days due to a series of bad decisions).

May 26, 2014

furuki

In Fairy Tail, when the king of the spirits speaks to certain people, he uses a word or phrase that they translate as "old friend". That's how he speaks to Loke in episode 32, and at the end he calls Lucy that, too.

What he's saying sounds to me like furuki but I can't find a reasonable entry in the dictionary for it that makes sense. What is he saying?

1
You heard it just right. 故き友 literally is an old friend. Well, I imagine calling someone "furui tomo" would make it a friend who you're trying to insult by hinting that he's decrepit or something, I dunno.

3
Actually, it really does lean down the "transvestite" meaning; it's possible to be gay without being an okama (and while the opposite is maybe theoretically possible, I haven't seen any examples of that in anime...)

They made this joke back in Kenshin, where one of the villains turned out to be an extremely convincing okama, practically trap level (and was also armed with an extremely large scythe... "o-kama", har har). The fansub translator ended up translating the punch line as "she's not a scythe-girl... she's a Rod-man!", which was a bit more apropo in those days, when Dennis was still being his odd self in the NBA.

6Moyashimon had a goth-loli trap who didn't think men should date men, so would that be an okama who wasn't gay? (Any opinion on agricultural anime?)

Posted by: muon at May 04, 2014 05:07 AM (XIprt)

7
Interestingly, my big dictionary from 1974 only has おかま (no kanji) as a synonym for 男娼 (male prostitute). It rarely includes honorific 御 as part of headwords, and the definitions of 釜 and 竈 are just pot and stove, respectively. No "volcanic crater" mention at all, which makes me wonder if that's a recent usage.

The goo.ne.jp dictionary entry has them all, and adds a general "sodomy" meaning, as well as "another name for maid servant". The ALC dictionary entry is just a slightly odd list of slang terms for gay men.

1
I know it's the first line in the song Ren'ai Circulation, so I checked lyrics. It was written "せーの", even though there's kanji in the lyrics elsewhere.

Searching on that (a million hits on google), I found a couple other references. It's also the title of Yuyushiki's OP (and occurs in the lyrics several times there as "せーのっ!"). And it's a TV drama that ran in the 80s.

So if it became "seeno" from "seinou", it took a roundabout path, I think.

I almost never hear a -tte form verb as "teh", it almost always sounds like "tay". -te sometimes sounds right, and -shite almost always sounds right (especially when they slur out the "i" completely and say "shteh").

Posted by: Mikeski at March 22, 2014 11:01 PM (Zlc1W)

3
JMdict has seino/seeno as "all together now!", etc. The interesting bit is that they list issei no as a variant, and いっせい (一斉) means "simultaneous".

The Meiji navy was partially modeled after the French navy. When French sailors would hoist a sail, they would shout "hisser, hisser" (hisser=hoist, pronounced /ise/) all at once. The navy picked up the term, and explained it as something you say when you work together (like rising a heavy object). The term then developed into several regional variations.

February 03, 2014

There are two series this season featuring Nobunaga, and there have been a lot of others. Why the fascination with this historical personage?

I think it's the same reason kids get fascinated with dinosaurs. (I'll explain later.)

Nobunaga lived in the 16th Century, and was a very successful warlord. In his day he conquered a third of Japan, and probably would have conquered all the rest if he hadn't been murdered by one of his top aides, Mitsuhide.

Afterwards, his top general Hideyoshi completed conquest of Japan, and then Ieyasu successfully revolted and established the Tokugawa Shogunate.

And that's where the dinosaurs come in. Lots of people ask why little kids are fascinated with dinosaurs. I think I know: the world of the dinosaurs was completely, totally different from ours, but it was real. It was an alternate path the earth could have followed. Our time would be vastly different without that damned asteroid!

And I think the fascination with Nobunaga is much the same. What if he hadn't been murdered? What if it had been Nobunaga who completed the conquest of Japan, and established a unified government instead of Ieyasu? How different would it have been?

1
It goes a bit deeper than even that. Oda was, in many ways, the last actually interesting and over-the-top Japanese personality. He's the closest thing Japanese history has to Alexander the Great: cunning, brilliance and quirks that always set him apart from his peers. And, like Alexander, he died before he'd completed everything he had set out to do.

He was the Man who would have unified Japan, but, in many ways, he's actually almost anti-Japanese in his rejection of the status quo & personal oddities. (He was an utter non-conformist, at least in the current historical perspective) Add in the fact that a Oda-derived Shogunate would have been fairly different, there has to be an assumed undercurrent that WW2 wouldn't have happened as it did.

So he's an important Man in Japanese history, but he's remembered as much for his rejection of the culture as its unification. That always has appeal to the common Japanese male audience.

Posted by: sqa at February 04, 2014 12:17 AM (WJILw)

2
A bit more on his place in history: he was the first of three great men who ended the century and a half long agony of the Sengoku jidai. He was followed by the rose from a peasant class Hideyoshi, who then pulled up the ladder and made sure that couldn't happen again, and who died during a futile quest to invade China through Korea. Hideyoshi was of course succeeded by the founding Tokugawa.

I've read, or at least gotten the impression, that a lot of the impetus that enabled the Tokugawa bakufu's roughly two and a half centuries of stasis---a very ugly period that's necessary for understanding modern Japan, but looks to me like it could also ruin your appreciation of anime and manga (that impression stopped me from learning more about it)---was the proceeding Sengoku jidai's chaos. So being the first of three to decisively end it strikes me as pretty significant.

Posted by: hga at February 04, 2014 06:58 AM (BfJzf)

3
I've always had a different view on why kids (boys, at least) get fascinated with *certain* creatures, people or ideas from history, dinosaurs especially. They're superheroes. T-Rex is Superman. What was once called a "Brontosaurus" is The Incredible Hulk. The various raptors are The Flash or Spiderman. One of the armored dinosaurs will be Iron Man. Some kid will talk about Allosaurus or Dilophosaurus or another lesser-known predator and claim it's like Batman.

I think this is similar to what kids do (or used to do) with the founding fathers and westward expansion pioneers. Who would win in a fight, Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone? (The weird kid takes Johnny Appleseed).

4
I was thinking Napoleon, but yeah, Alexander is probably a better match there.

Part of it is plain ol' lack of competition. There's just not a lot of
notable Japanese government figures; plenty of names and damned little
of substance behind most of them. They can't really look to modern
history for that kind of larger-than-life figure either - the notable
emperors were far too stage-managed for that sort of thing, and of
course modern politics is tawdry enough that you can't really be a
prime-minister-hero.

Same with military history - the Tokugawa period simply didn't have
notable engagements, and the brief period of Japanese military
ascendancy becomes utterly eclipsed by the Second World War, from which
Japan just wasn't allowed to take any heroic examples.

The only grouping of folk heroes and national myth-making left is the
fall of the Shogunate, and there are a number of larger-than-life
fellows in that grouping too. But a lot of them are famous in the way
William Travis was famous - doomed to have died valiantly. But Oda was
successful, even if he didn't live to see it...

5
As an aside, I can enjoy anime and manga despite being able to read quite a lot of pro-Axis revisionist history into much of it. Reading up more on Meiji and the Bakufu doesn't seem likely to make the counter argument to enjoyment much more significant for me.

The other thing is that talking about the Bakufu, or the political figures after does not have a huge history of not being political. Whereas, the end of the Sengoku is notable and of interest, but not so likely to be grounds for a political argument.

Perhaps because of the, IIRC, Christanity, making Oda a demon or demon user isn't terribly controversal in Japan.

In short, near enough that every knows a little, and far enough that only the hard core will pick fights over taking freedoms with it.